This page was updated in January 2022
There was no need for an Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, and we believe there is also no need for the super-charged development that remains the aim of all Ox-Cam Arc plans. We will therefore continue actively to campaign against them and support other organisations with the same objectives.
Our environment is a national asset which should be protected for all us, our health and well-being. This is a national and not just a local issue. You can find out more about us and our beginnings here.
This is not a ‘NIMBY’ campaign: we stand beside all the communities across the country that find themselves in a similar fight, where ill thought through development plans are literally bulldozing through the countryside – you cannot replace acres of ancient woodlands and thousand-year-old communities.
We are not against housing development: we believe we need investment in social housing and object to the scale of the aimed for development. Targets for housing growth must be in line with ONS forecasts.
We are not anti-growth: we believe that aiming for endless growth is not sustainable and not responsible.
Our campaign to STOP the Oxford to Cambridge Expressway focused on three key areas. This will continue into the future as we challenge all Ox-Cam Arc plans.
1 – Fact finding
We’ve spent a lot of time looking at documents, talking with interested groups, communities, Councillors and local MPs and have also talked with Highways England (now called National Highways), England’s Economic Heartland, the Arc Universities Group and the Arc Environment Working Group as well as with various wildlife charities such as BBOWT and the RSPB. Our ambition is to understand as much as possible about the Oxford to Cambridge Arc plans, their real objectives, processes, key players etc. You can find out more about what we’ve found out here.
2 – Awareness raising
We spend a lot of time raising awareness of the proposed Ox-Cam Arc plans and housing targets. It’s been a huge part of the campaign because our own Councils, Highways England and others are simply not doing this.
We are determined to ensure as many people as possible along the corridor know about these plans, how they can get involved and when public consultation will finally happen! We want everyone to be able to have their say.
Awareness raising takes many forms. In 2019 we presented the latest information at village, town and group meetings (over 40 in that year alone!) and we have a “travelling pagoda” and display which we took to village fetes and other events. We held an event in Bonn Square, Oxford, “walked the moor”, leafleted many communities, put “Under Threat” signs in more than 25 communities, and designed and marketed our fundraising t-shirts. We also try to keep our website up to date with the latest news and share information on our Facebook page and through Twitter. This work culminated in us presenting our no expressway petition to 10 Downing Street in February 2020, and having, on the same day, a drop-in event in Parliament to which we invited all MPs.
Later in 2020, Covid-19 put a halt to many of the above activities but, just as the Government did not halt its plans for the Ox-Cam Arc, so we did not stop keeping abreast of all potential developments that will affect our region. Significant numbers of meetings were held during the first year of ‘lockdown’ and several webinars explored one or more aspects of Ox-Cam Arc proposals. Most of these were aimed at developers or investors, and none has involved the public in putting its own point of view in response to the proposals.
Developer meetings continued in 2021, when we also had the first of three promised public consultations on the Arc Spatial Framework. With other campaigning groups we held our own ‘consultation’, asking the difficult questions that the official consultation carefully avoided. More than 90% of respondents would vote ‘No’ to the Ox-Cam Arc if given the chance; but will they be given such a chance?
We are aware of what may be significant changes heralded by Michael Gove’s arrival in 2021 in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, DLUHC, (the successor to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, MHCLG); the call by some Local Districts for all Arc plans to be ‘paused; the apparent disbandment of an Ox-Cam Arc working group within the MHCLG; and, finally by the cancellation in early December 2021 of a planned high-level Ministerial meeting with the Arc Leaders Group (ALG). We wonder what all these developments mean and if the Government is having second thoughts about how it can achieve its levelling up objectives if it continues to invest in the economically over-heated South East.
If you would like to talk to us about raising awareness of the Ox-Cam Arc plans in your community, you can contact us here.
3 – Working to STOP the expressway and to challenge future Arc plans
Our campaign had a significant effect on raising awareness of, and opposition to, the Ox-Cam expressway. In fact, work on the expressway at the Oxford end of the Arc was described by Bridget Rosewell of the National Infrastrucure Commission (NIC) as ‘both challenged and challenging’; and the Chair of the NIC, Sir John Armitt, also acknowledged the opposition of local communities around Oxford to the scheme. Campaigns such as ours, along with those of many others, can make a difference, and we like to think that we made a significant contribution to getting the expressway officially cancelled in March 2021.
But we cannot let up the pressure now at the time when many are re-considering the future of our region and country after Covid-19. The battle against the over-development of the Ox-Cam Arc has only just begun. Government is putting into place key mechanisms for deciding the future of this area. But, as before, NONE of those mechanisms involves the general public in the heart of the decision-making process. We will only see what the Government wants us to see, often long after key decisions have already been taken. Meanwhile those developer meetings (previous section) continue in 2022.
The Government talks about ‘working with local partners’. The Stop the Arc Group is in a prime position to be one of those local partners because we have talked to more of the people who actually live across the Arc than any other group, including Government Ministries. Our application to be a local partner was turned down, however, on the grounds that the local partners have already been identified.
And who might these local partners be?
Sadly it’s the usual suspects of Local Authority representatives and Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). The latter often have tens or even hundreds of employees, not a single one of whom has ever been elected. Why, in a democracy, should decisions be taken about people’s futures that do not involve the people themselves? LEPs are interested in only one thing - the development of businesses, and the increase in economic revenues from the areas under their control. The sense of place of communities and their important natural environment are of no interest at all to LEPs. They are ’local partners’ without any interest in the communities they affect, and without any accountability should things go wrong. You really couldn’t design a less democratic system even if you tried.
Right from the start of our campaign, we raised awareness of the over-inflated housing target of one million new houses proposed for the Arc, a number that a senior representative of Bidwells property consultants described as ‘poisonous’ during a November 2020 webinar, and that the Chair of the Arc Universities Group described as ‘petrol on a fire’ in a Built Environment webinar in December 2020, a webinar that had the strapline “Developing the Corridor – £billions in Construction Works, 1m New Homes, 1m New Jobs….”. Through all of our activities we hope to put pressure on our democratically elected officials to pay attention to the issue, listen to their constituents and oppose the over-inflated development targets of all Ox-Cam Arc plans.
We presented our Ox-Cam Arc petition to 10 Downing Street at the end of February 2020, but the petition is still open if you would like to sign it here!
We continue to promote our campaign in any way we can throughout the Covid period, with webinars, newsletters, a Westminster event and a special conference ‘Alternatives to the Ox-Cam Arc’ in November 2021. If you have any ideas, or would like to help, please contact us at noexpresswaygroup@gmail.com or stopthearc@gmail.com